Enhanced traffic enforcement to begin soon

Times Reporter 

 

Staff Sgt. Kevin Reilly was asked to attend the March 19 town council meeting to discuss traffic enforcement. Reilly had been asked if he would be able to share more information regarding the Alberta Sheriffs program. 

The Alberta’s Sheriff’s mandate, as best as Reilly could find, is to work with local RCMP traffic units to perform traffic law enforcement duties in addition to education and awareness. Traffic sheriffs are deployed to reduce high-risk driving and behaviour, improve traffic and enforcement on our highways and reduce the incidents of injury and fatality and collisions on our provincial highways.

Previously there had been a question about whether the sheriffs could come into town and help with regular enforcement. 

“Their mandate and primary goal is to do the traffic enforcement on our provincial highways, both primary and secondary. Although they do come into town at times it is only for certain, specific offenses that are very difficult to enforce on the highways and those are the distracted driving seatbelts impaired driving and obviously for check stop programs,” said Reilly.

“They usually call the local police service, in this case the RCMP here in Strathmore, to try and do a cooperative operation … and we try and get our members out with them at the same time so there’s bigger visibility.”

Reilly said there is nothing set up within the Alberta traffic sheriffs to be able to contract them or have them come in under a Memorandum of Understanding, and he thinks part of that reason is that they leave it to the actual local police force service.

“The difficulties that sometimes arise with the sheriffs is that they don’t have the same powers … with regards to drugs, warrants and impaired drivers. Those are outside their scope of duty and when they do come across those they have to call RCMP officers,” said Reilly. 

That is part of the reason why the sheriffs work with an integrated traffic unit with Sheriffs and RCMP, so that they can use that RCMP member if they come across an instance outside of their scope of duty. That is something which has happened a number of times and the RCMP takes over the investigation.

On April 1 the RCMP will begin the six-month traffic initiative for enhanced traffic control and policing within town. Reilly has asked members of the detachment for input on problem areas and said he would also like to gain input from the town as well. Reilly plans to return to council every two months with updates on how the initiative is going, followed by an in-depth, detailed report at the end of the six-month time frame.